THE POISON WAS PATIENT

12 July 2021 My husband died on a Thursday evening, and by sunset, our home had already begun to fill with people who wanted explanations I did not have the courage to give. Some came carrying sympathy. Some came carrying curiosity. By nightfall, both looked exactly the same. Raghav had been ill for months by then—nothing dramatic enough to frighten outsiders, nothing visible enough to make anyone call it suspicious. Just a slow decline. A body that seemed to be forgetting how to remain strong. A face that had begun to lose its colour. A voice that no longer carried the arrogance I had once mistaken for confidence. The doctors blamed stress. Then exhaustion. Then complications no one could explain with certainty. I said very little during those months. I had learned, over the years, that silence was the only thing in my marriage that truly belonged to me. When they covered his body that evening, I remember staring at his hands—the same hands that had once trembled when they tied a wedding thread around my neck, the same hands that later learned cruelty with frightening ease. It is strange, the details grief chooses to preserve. Not the grand moments. Not the final words. Just fragments. A glass left half-full on the bedside table. The smell of his cologne still trapped in the wardrobe. The shape of another woman’s name hidden in the brightness of his phone screen. Everyone thinks this story begins with my husband’s death. It doesn’t. It begins years earlier, with love—reckless, absolute love—and with the kind of faith that makes a woman mistake possession for devotion. If I am going to tell this story, I have to begin there. Before the illness. Before the whispers. Before I learned that some betrayals do not destroy you all at once—they soften you first, slowly, until even your grief begins to feel rehearsed. I was twenty-four when I married Raghav Malhotra. And at the time, I believed I knew exactly what kind of man he was. I was wrong.